DURING the 1950s, New York City was the capital of baseball, and I was lucky to be a teenager absorbing a lifetime of memories.

My New York generation experienced a Subway Series in 1951, 1952, 1953, 1955, and 1956..

I got spoiled at an early age. I thought a Subway Series was the natural order of the universe.

As a teenage Dodger fan I sat in the cheap seats for the 7th game of both the 1955 and 1956 World Series.

As processed by an adolescent baseball fanatic, the Subway Series felt like a combination of Mardi Gras, civil war, school holiday, and an orgy of New York civic pride. The whole nation was looking at us.

In those days we didn”t need 24-hour all-sports radio, or themed sports bars with 20 TV screens, to incite inter-borough rivalry or bar stool passions.

All these Subway Series came in the context of New York City being the center of the baseball world, the factory of Hall of Fame heroes.

We had the three best centerfielders in the game all playing here every day – Willie Mays, Mickey Mantle, and Duke Snider. It was mastery as a routine.

Every autumn it seemed New York’s three ballparks were a stage for miracles.

Bobby Thomson’s ninth inning home run in the deciding playoff game in 1951 at the Polo Grounds gave the Giants the pennant.

Willie Mays made his mythic catch in the Polo Grounds in the 1954 World Series. The game was tied 2-2 in the eighth, and Cleveland”s Vic Wertz hit a drive into deep center that looked like a triple.

Willie raced to the spot where he thought the ball would come down, and caught it over the shoulder with his back to home plate. It was geometry married to speed.

The turning point of the 1955 Subway Series was the running, one-handed catch – and throw-by Sandy Amoros at Yankee Stadium that saved the Dodgers.

The last Subway Series was played the next season, another Yankees-Dodgers rematch that would go seven see-saw games.

The Dodgers, slight underdogs, won the first two games played at home. They won Game 1 behind the pitching of 39-year-old Sal Maglie, 6-3.

They won Game 2, 13-8. Yankee starter Don Larsen was blasted out of the game in the second inning when the Dodgers scored six runs.

At this point is seemed Brooklyn would win their second series in a row, after their famine of 52 years had ended the year before.

But the Yankees came back and won the middle three games at home.

But it was Game 5 they will talk about as long as they build stadiums and teach kids how to throw a curveball.

Don Larsen, the loser in Game 2, was sent to the mound by Casey Stengel, who sometimes referred to his pitcher as “my drunk.”

But on this day – October 8, 1956- Larsen (who was drinking the night before) pitched the only perfect game in World Series history.

He retired 27 Dodgers in a row. No hits, no walks, no errors – just white zeroes on the black, hand-run scoreboard in the outfield..

I watched that game in a brick oven pizza hang-out near Hunter (now Lehman ) College in the Bronx, where I was a freshman. Originally the tension came from the fact this was the fifth game of a series tied 2-2.

By the fifth inning we became aware that Larsen was pitching a no-hitter. And Sal Maglie was almost matching him with his aching 39-year-old arm.

In the fifth, Mickey Mantle saved the no-hitter by making a running, backhanded catch of a Gil Hodges drive into the gap.

By the eighth inning there were 100 people jammed into the pizza joint to observe the possible miracle in the making.

I was thinking back to the 1947 Subway Series. That’s when Floyd Bevans of the Yankees had a no-hitter going with two out in the ninth inning.

But then pinch-hitter Cookie Lavagetto ruined the no-hitter with a double off the Ebbets Field scoreboard in right – and incredibly, the Dodgers won the game, 3-2.

So many Subway Series heroes have been marginal players – Al Gionfrido and Lavagetto in 1947, Dusty Rhodes in 1954, Amoros and Johnny Podres in 1955. And now Larsen.

I remember watching that small, black and white TV set off Bedford Park Blvd., as the last inning started, and all 64,000 fans at the stadium- two miles to the south- were standing and holding their breathe.

Larsen got Carl Furillo to fly out to Hank Bauer. Then he got Roy Campanella to ground out to Billy Martin.

The last Dodger hitter was Dale Mitchell, sent up to pinch-hit for Maglie. Larsen got Mitchell looking, with a little checked swing, at a called third strike. It seemed high and outside on that small TV set.

Larsen had thrown just 97 pitches.

The losing pitcher, sore-armed and ancient Sal Maglie, had only given up five hits and two runs – good enough to win most Series games.

But the Dodgers did not roll over and die.

The next day Clem Labine hurled his own gem. The Dodgers and Yankees were scoreless after nine innings in an elimination game for the Dodgers.

In the tenth inning, 37 year old Jackie Robinson, on aching knees, in the next to last game of his history-changing career, won the game with a clutch single.

I cut classes for Game Seven and sat in the Ebbets Field bleachers with my friend Len Valenti, who would later become a copy editor on the Daily News.

The game was a calamity from the perspective of an 18 year old Dodger fan. The now forgotten Johnny Kucks picthed a three hit shut out, 9-0.

The bleachers were a silent wake all afternoon.

The was the last game of the last Subway Series.

After the season Walter O’Malley traded Jackie Robinson to the Giants, and Jackie retired rather than play for the enemy.

The following August, O’Malley announced the Dodgers were moving to Los Angeles and Horace Stoneham acknowledged the Giants were going to San Francisco.

Our golden age of baseball was dead.

It is now 43 years since New York has experienced the joy, pride, tension, division, and fun of a Subway Series.

One night about 15 years ago Pete Hamill and I were sitting in the now defunct Lion”s Head bar, playing a little game.

Hamill and I were each writing down a list of “the three worst human beings of the 20th century.”

The two native sons of Brooklyn independently wrote down the same three names, in the same exact order.